Innovation, Technology and the Power of Community: Conservation Solutions for A Brighter Future

World Wildlife Fund is coming to Houston!

The scale and complexity of the threats to nature demand new and innovative solutions. Around the world, fueled by your support, WWF is using game-changing technology and partnering in novel ways with communities to accelerate conservation impacts. In Africa, thermal cameras are helping to keep elephants and rhinos safe from poachers, and in the Northern Great Plains, the same technology is being used to monitor and recover black-footed ferrets, one of North America’s most endangered mammals. Join World Wildlife Fund and hear from Colby Loucks, Deputy Goal Lead and Senior Director, Wildlife Conservation Program, and Kristy Bly, Senior Program Officer, Northern Great Plains Program, to learn how WWF is harnessing the power of technological innovation and collaborating with communities to protect wildlife and wild places near and far.

Colby Loucks
Deputy Goal Lead and Senior Director, Wildlife Conservation Program

Colby Loucks joined WWF in 1996 and leads WWF’s Wildlife Technology Innovation Lab, which focuses on harnessing cutting-edge technologies to advance wildlife conservation. He also leads WWF’s effort to evaluate the environmental, biological, and social impacts of Forest Stewardship Council certification in tropical forests. Early on, Loucks led several of WWF’s ecoregion conservation assessments. He went on to combine his expertise in GIS, conservation biology, and landscape ecology to identify remaining habitat for pandas in China’s Shaanxi Province. This work was the foundation for China’s decision to double the region’s protected areas for pandas. Loucks contributed to the global teams that created the Global 200 and Alliance for Zero Extinction. More recently, he led an analysis of the impacts of war on species loss in Cambodia.

Kristy Bly
Senior Wildlife Conservation Biologist, Northern Great Plains Program

Kristy Bly is a Senior Wildlife Conservation Biologist for the World Wildlife Fund’s Northern Great Plains (NGP) Program. Her focus is on the conservation and restoration of black-footed ferrets, black-tailed prairie dogs and swift foxes on tribal, public and private lands in the NGP ecoregion. She works in partnership with local communities and myriad tribal, state, federal and private entities to restore habitat for and populations of all three species. Kristy came to WWF in July 2007 from the Turner Endangered Species Fund, where she led the black-footed ferret restoration project on the Bad River Ranches in central South Dakota. From 1994 to 2007, she contributed to grizzly bear, lynx, and wolf research in the Northern Rockies and Yellowstone National Park and worked to restore condors, black-tailed prairie dogs, black-footed ferrets, and swift foxes to the desert southwest and the grasslands of South Dakota. Kristy holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Wildlife Biology and Management from the University of Rhode Island and a Master’s degree in Ecology from Montana State University. She advises several Master of Science students, is a member of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Black-footed Ferret Recovery Implementation Team and the Swift Fox Conservation Team, in addition to various state black-footed ferret and prairie dog working groups.